FAITH MATTERS: Whitewashed tombs

Daniel Payne

Saturday

Sep 2, 2017 at 12:01 AMSep 6, 2017 at 10:37 AM

There has been a lot of talk lately about evangelical support for President Trump. According to Edison Media Research exit polling, 80 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. At Liberty University – an evangelical flagship university and mecca of Trump adulation and devotion – Trump received a whopping 85 percent of the vote. This is less shocking, I suppose, when Jerry Falwell Jr. is Trump’s proverbial “voice in the wilderness.” Jerry is to Donald as John the Baptist was to Jesus, at least in the eyes of most American evangelicals.

But the dam might be cracking with the recent white nationalist violence in Charlottesville and the murder of Heather Heyer by the neo-Nazi terrorist, James Fields. Apparently, it takes the tragic death of a white woman for the scales to fall from the eyes of political lemmings. In the aftermath of Trump’s equivocation of white supremacists with anti-fascist counter-protesters, some Liberty graduates have had enough.

On Aug. 16, Jerry Falwell Jr. once again bent the knee to Trump, tweeting praise for the president’s “bold, truthful statement about the #charlottesville tragedy.” Just to clarify his admiration, Falwell Jr. went on Fox & Friends to say that “President Donald Trump does not have a racist bone in his body. I know him well. He loves all people. He’s worked so hard to help minorities in the inner cities. … He’s doing all the right things to help the people that are in need, the minorities.”

In a nod to Falwell Jr’s deference, Trump replied (also by tweet): “The Fake News should listen to what he had to say. Thanks Jerry!” Trump added that Falwell Jr. had been “fantastic” on the show, which seems to be Trump’s chief source of media intake. Nothing like a mutual ego massage.

To date, Georgia Hamann, one of the coordinators of a group urging Liberty University graduates to return their diplomas to the university in protest, estimates that 50 graduates have indicated they are willing to do so thus far. Such direct action appears promising. Perhaps the evangelical tide is changing. One might be tempted to think so, but compared to the 2016 enrollment numbers at Liberty (115,000 residential and online undergraduates and 19,300 residential and online postgraduates), 50 former graduates seems like a drop in the bucket. That’s not to take away from the importance of such protest, but it hardly represents a sea change in evangelical attitudes towards Trump.

Much has been made of the erosion of evangelical moral authority in light of support for the Trump presidency, but I maintain evangelical moral authority has never been the standard of ethical praxis or a virtuous worldview. Quite the contrary. Since the 1970s, at least, the vast majority of evangelicals have represented an oppressive and repressive morality, leading to immense, and often untold, cruelty and suffering. This has been the harsh reality for racial minorities, sexual minorities, and anyone else not fitting the evangelical mold, and who finds himself or herself surrounded by the evangelical subculture.

Why should one be surprised that Falwell Jr. praises Trump’s equivocation between racists and those who struggle for equality when Falwell Sr. said in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate public schools, “integration will destroy our race eventually.” Bob Jones University, Liberty’s more fundamentalist cousin, forbade interracial dating and encountered resistance from the IRS due to that policy. In this battle over desegregation, the Moral Majority was born, and it was anything but moral. Whatever evangelicals were before 1971, it is certain that after 1971, they were the opposite of a “moral authority.”

It is not surprising, then, that evangelicals are morally bankrupt today. The only astonishing component to the discourse swirling around evangelical support for Trump is that some people seem to be surprised that 80 percent of evangelicals support the racist policies and statements of the current administration.

In Mark 2:21-22, Jesus scolds his disciples for expecting traditional views to produce spiritual renewal. He tells them, “And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.” I wonder what Jesus might say to Falwell Jr. today, assuming he was even granted an audience in the university president's office? I imagine it might include a mention or two of “whitewashed tombs.”

The Rev. Daniel Payne is an ordained minister with the Progressive Christian Alliance and director of religious education and community outreach at Harvard Unitarian Universalist Church in Harvard, Massachusetts. He is the author of “From Faith to Freedom: A Gay Man’s Escape From Christian Fundamentalism,” which will be published in the fall of 2017 by Apocryphile Press.. He may be reached at syndicatedcolumn@gmail.com.

Here's one opinion. What's yours? Click here to write a letter to the editor of up to 200 words or leave a comment on the story. Read more columns, editorials and letters